"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."
--Dwight Eisenhower

When Ted Koppel announced plans to read the names of the soldiers who'd died so far in Iraq, the country's right erupted in righteous anger. The president has yet to attend any of the fallen soldiers' funerals, and media are strictly banned from covering the arriving caskets; a photo of 20 flag-draped coffins awaiting transport created another furor last month. The Pentagon is vastly undercounting its injured, and not counting Iraqi dead at all.

Welcome to Memorial Day 2004, in which we are all supposed to focus on a new World War II memorial, and forget about the more unsavory war we're in right now.

This was an insult waiting to happen. Both generals and politicians learned from Vietnam that when people are confronted with the real, as opposed to imagined, costs of a war that makes no sense, they tend to pull back in horror. War is a messy thing, and in the modern American version, even though we will invariably kill a lot more than we lose, the losses aren't supposed to happen at all. Our poop don't stink, and our soldiers don't die. The Clinton years -- with their preference for war waged from 40,000 feet -- epitomized the trend.

But you can't run an occupation from an airplane, and when the people whose land you're occupying want you out, no heavily guarded enclaves and meticulously fortified (or not) convoys can afford protection from their wrath. Before the end of the day, you still have to show your face.

Some time this Memorial Day weekend, if not before, the 800th such American face will be fatally shot at or blown up in Iraq. But we're not supposed to notice.

And most of us won't. In fact, we won't think much about any of the dead from wars past or current. Instead, we'll kick off summer: shopping, going to the country, working around the house, or doing whatever it is we do on three-day weekends. Not even a brand new yellow or chartreuse or whatever-it-is-today alert is supposed to keep us from doing what it is we always do, which is generally to ignore bad things happening a long ways away.

More and more, however, Americans aren't ignoring what's happening in Iraq. It's hard to do so when the news has been so unrelenting, and so consistently bad. Stay the course? Stay the course? Would anyone in their right mind stay this course?

But that's exactly the point. There's no such thing as a "good" war. All war is hell. In all wars, people die. Atrocities are committed. Lives are forever changed. War is the single organized activity humankind has devised that can uproot (or end) so many lives with such callous disregard for the victims' humanity. To know war, as more than one former warrior has averred, is to hate it.

And, so, Memorial Day -- when, according to our wise rulers, it's anti-war to look war in the face.

The true test of the value of any conflict comes at this point. Is the cost in lost lives worth it? At this point, it's hard to tell, in Afghanistan as well as Iraq, what "it" even is. In Afghanistan, 31 months of war have left the country ruled by warlords (excepting Hamid Karzai, the mayor of Kabul). Women have no rights. The countryside is producing 80% of the world's heroin. The Taliban is growing stronger. And Osama bin Laden, of course, is still at large.

In Iraq, the notion that Americans can usher in democracy of any sort is about to get a very rude reality check. In the security chaos that has been the occupation thus far, every faction with more than a few members has been organizing a militia, and sooner or later they'll all be shooting at each other. Except when they shoot at the Americans.

George Bush got us into this mess, but John Kerry doesn't have a way out, either. The only thing likely to change either one's thinking is a lot more dead soldiers. Reality is busily preparing just such a wake-up call.

That call is inevitable because there's no enemy to defeat in this war, and no possible justification for the dead. Terror has nothing to do with it. We're fighting, ostensibly, on behalf of the people who want us gone.

We could, of course, honor their wishes, honor those soldiers already fallen, and pull out, in favor of a truly international reconstructive effort that would be far less likely to trigger civil war. We could not only honor the past dead, but prevent future deaths.

That would mean paying attention. And paying attention to this war is exactly what we're not supposed to be doing.

Happy Memorial Day.